Ursula Goodenough is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She was educated at Radcliffe and Barnard Colleges and at Columbia and Harvard University, where she received a PhD in 1969. She was Assistant and Associate Professor of Biology at Harvard before moving to Washington University. She teaches a cell biology course for undergraduate biology majors and also co-teaches a course, The Epic of Evolution, with a physicist and a geologist, for non-science students. Her research focuses on the cell biology and (molecular) genetics of the sexual phase of the life cycle of the unicellular eukaryotic green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and, more recently, on the evolution of the genes governing mating-related traits. She wrote 3 editions of a widely adopted textbook, Genetics, and has served in numerous capacities in national biomedical arenas. She joined the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science in 1989 and has served the organization since then in various executive capacities. She has presented and published papers and seminars on science and religion in numerous arenas and wrote a book, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford University Press, 1998) that offers religious/spiritual perspectives of Nature, particularly biology at a molecular level.

Steven Chu is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He did his PhD and postdoctoral work at Berkeley before joining AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1978. While at Bell Laboratories, he did the first laser spectroscopy of positronium, an atom consisting of an electron and positron. Also at Bell Laboratories, he showed how to cool atoms with laser light (optical molasses) and demonstrated the first optical trap for atoms. This trap, known as “optical tweezers,” is also used to trap microscopic particles in water and is widely used in biology. His group demonstrated the magneto-optic trap, the most commonly used atom trap.

He joined the Stanford Physics Department in 1987. His group at Stanford made the first frequency standard based on an atomic fountain of atoms and developed ultra-sensitive atom interferometers. Using the optical tweezers, He developed methods to simultaneously visualize and manipulate single bio-molecules. His group is also applying methods such as fluorescence microscopy, optical tweezers and atomic force methods to study the protein and RNA folding and enzyme activity of individual bio-molecules. Notable findings include the discovery of “molecular individualism” and the chemical/kinetic basis for “molecular memory”.

For his work, he has received numerous awards including co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Sinica. He is also a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering.

Eric Lander, PhD, a geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, is a member of the Whitehead Institute and the Founder and Director of the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research, one of the world’s leading genome centers. He is one of the driving forces behind today’s revolution in genomics, the study of all of the genes in an organism and how they function together in health and disease. Dr. Lander has been one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project. He is also Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Lander earned his BA in mathematics from Princeton University in 1978 and his PhD in mathematics from Oxford University in 1981. In addition to his work in biology, he was an assistant and associate professor of managerial economics at the Harvard Business School from 1981 to 1990. Dr. Lander was named a Rhodes Scholar in 1978 and received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987 for his work in genetics. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1997, the U.S. Institute of Medicine in 1998, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees, and has served on many advisory boards for governments, academic institutions, scientific societies, and companies.

Daniel Kahneman is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Kahneman has held the position of professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1970-1978), the University of British Columbia (1978-1986), and the University of California, Berkeley (1986-1994). Dr. Kahneman is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society. He has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2002), the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013). Dr. Kahneman holds honorary degrees from numerous Universities.